A problem in determining the cause of a natural infectious outbreak or a bioterrorist attack is the sheer variety of organisms that can cause human disease. There are over 1400 organisms infectious to humans; many of these have the potential to emerge suddenly in a natural epidemic or to be used in a malicious attack by bioterrorists (Taylor et al. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London B. Biol. Sci., 2001, 356, 983-989). This number does not include numerous strain variants, bioengineered versions, or pathogens that infect plants or animals.
Much of the new technology being developed for detection of biological weapons incorporates a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) step based upon the use of highly specific primers and probes designed to selectively detect certain pathogenic organisms. Although this approach is appropriate for the most obvious bioterrorist organisms, like smallpox and anthrax, experience has shown that it is very difficult to predict which of hundreds of possible pathogenic organisms might be employed in a terrorist attack. Likewise, naturally emerging human disease that has caused devastating consequence in public health has come from unexpected families of bacteria, viruses, fungi, or protozoa. Plants and animals also have their natural burden of infectious disease agents and there are equally important biosafety and security concerns for agriculture.
A major conundrum in public health protection, biodefense, and agricultural safety and security is that these disciplines need to be able to rapidly identify and characterize infectious agents, while there is no existing technology with the breadth of function to meet this need. Currently used methods for identification of bacteria rely upon culturing the bacterium to effect isolation from other organisms and to obtain sufficient quantities of nucleic acid followed by sequencing of the nucleic acid, both processes which are time and labor intensive.
Mass spectrometry provides detailed information about the molecules being analyzed, including high mass accuracy. It is also a process that can be easily automated. DNA chips with specific probes can only determine the presence or absence of specifically anticipated organisms. Because there are hundreds of thousands of species of benign bacteria, some very similar in sequence to threat organisms, even arrays with 10,000 probes lack the breadth needed to identify a particular organism.
The present invention provides oligonucleotide primers and compositions and kits containing the oligonucleotide primers, which define bacterial bioagent identifying amplicons and, upon amplification, produce corresponding amplification products whose molecular masses provide the means to identify bacteria, for example, at and below the species taxonomic level.